Impact of the proportion of emotional faces on ensemble perception of group emotion.
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: In everyday life, we frequently interact with crowds with faces showing various emotional expressions. Ensemble coding allows the visual system to efficiently extract average group emotion in groups of faces. However, this process is biased as emotional intensity of the group is often overestimated. This amplification effect is reported to increase as a function of group size. Yet, it remains unclear whether this effect is driven only by the number of faces or could be influenced by another factor, the proportion of emotional faces in the group. The present study tested whether the amplification effect is driven by group size or the proportion of emotional faces within the group. Emotional valence (anger vs. happiness) was also manipulated as a potential influence of the amplification effect. Twenty-one participants estimated the average emotion intensity in groups of 4, 8, or 16 male faces, with 25%, 50%, or 75% of faces showing either happiness or anger. The amplification effect was operationalized as the proportional estimation error between the actual and estimated proportion of emotional faces. The results showed that larger groups were associated with greater amplification than small groups, that amplification increased when the proportion of emotional faces was higher, and that it was consistently stronger for anger than for happiness. These findings suggest that amplification may not depend only on group size, but also on the proportion of emotional faces, and that valence could modulate this effect. Together, the results highlight the role of structural and emotional factors in shaping how people perceive group emotions.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Authors: MOURGUES, Guillaume T. Vallet, Simon Rigoulot
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213617988